All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [54]
“I’m sorry, Ashley,” she said. “I understand the urge to rescue everybody, but that’s not how it works. PSI is not a rescue organization. We are a public health organization. That is our core competency, and we do it well. We have to stay clear of rescuing, or we would lose all access to slaves and prostitutes.”
I felt as if I were in the proverbial rabbit hole as Kate unleashed a bewildering profusion of information. She explained what I had already witnessed: that we could not do our work without the cooperation and, yes, trust of brothel owners. The hard, painful truth was that if the pimps and madams thought we were impeding their business or had other agendas and motives, they would shut down the programs and kick us out.
She explained that we had to walk a fine line to operate within the existing system, as abhorrent as the system was, in order to have privileged access to an underground population. She had to remind me that what we do in brothels is but a thin slice of PSI’s work. We are much more: malaria prevention and treatment. Safe drinking water. Child survival. Maternal health. Reproductive health. Family planning. In sixty-five countries worldwide.
“In this setting, we do public health triage, if you will, to protect enslaved prostitutes from disease,” said Kate. “However demented it sounds, it is a portal of grace to help people no other organization has the chance to get to. Slaves would have no health care providers at all without PSI.”
By now I was curled in a ball on the backseat, whimpering. We had reached the end of the brothel district, and the police moved aside saw-horses to let us pass. I realized the police were not there to keep the peace or enforce the law; they simply decided who had access. We pulled onto the main road north and left the world of Pattaya behind, as if it hadn’t existed. I couldn’t let that happen.
“But Kate, if we don’t help them, who will?”
“There are rescue organizations and churches that specialize in this work, Ashley,” said Kate. “They could be tipped off based on what we see on our visits, especially when we see and hear about children used in prostitution.” She assured me that there were dozens of rescue groups in Thailand and across Southeast Asia that provide shelter, legal counseling, and, most important, education and training for slaves and prostituted sex workers who wanted the chance of a better life. Kate told me about the incredible Somaly Mam, a former sex slave who opened three rehabilitation shelters in Cambodia and has rescued hundreds if not thousands of slaves through her NGO.
“We can ally ourselves with extraordinary partners whose core competency complements our own,” said Kate. “And as individuals, we can of course fight like hell with the NGOs that have expertise in the abolition of the modern slave trade.”
PSI also has a long-term plan to empower women by providing the structure and the tools they needed to improve their lives within their existing circumstances. (“God will meet me where I am,” I began to repeat to myself. “Come as you are,” the old hymn says.) We are able to help many prostituted women supplement their incomes, training them as peer educators, allowing them to reduce the number of “clients” they are forced to take. One woman’s reproductive health empowerment helps her educate scores of others. We offer them English lessons because so many clients are North American and European tourists and they need our language to insist on condom use, to speak up for themselves in a dynamic in which they are powerless (and to stick to their guns on the condom; men will often pay more for condomless sex). We give them medical checkups, often on the premises (many are not allowed to leave the brothels, others are too ashamed or psychologically disabled to leave), tests, and the medicines to stay healthy and treat disease.
“We’re looking out for them in every way short of dragging them away in the middle of the night,” said Kate.
By the time we reached